Comments on: Upgrading to Fedora 12? You might need more /boot space!

By: Val Eckertson

Val Eckertson — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 01:40:26 +0000

Hi, just found your post and it maybe very useful to me. After doing the preupgrade things were going well until I rebooted.

Error 15: File not found
Press any key to continue..

Which brought me to the Grub menu but none of the selections would work.
Grub.conf has the following:

default=1
timeout=0
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Upgrade to Fedora 12 (Constantine)
	kernel /upgrade/vmlinuz preupgrade repo=hd::/var/cache/yum/preupgrade stage2=hd:UUID=5fc030f5-0a5b-4ae2-bd54-9b59a042dc58:/upgrade/install.img ks=hd:UUID=5fc030f5-0a5b-4ae2-bd54-9b59a042dc58:/upgrade/ks.cfg
	initrd /upgrade/initrd.img

Looking through the links you supplied I am still questioning what to do next. I have 27Mb in my /boot currently.

I would appreciate any assistance you have time to provide.

Thanks,
Val

By: Karl Lewis

Karl Lewis — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:20:21 +0000

Thanks for this. I’d gotten over this problem on one system just be deleting old kernels… but when that didn’t work on another machine I was out of ideas. The `tune2fs -r 0 /dev/whatever` trick is worth its weight in gold.

Fedora 12 rocks.

KWL

By: Nick

Nick — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:45:14 +0000

My laptop is always on wireless and I did not want to go through the trouble of running a wired connection through my home. So, I thought what would happen if “install.img” was not in the /boot/upgrades partition, will the upgrade still work? In my case, I have a /boot partition of 100mb, because I installed Fedora 8 on my laptop and I have upgraded it via DVD through Fedora 11. So, if preupgrade did not work, then I would have had to download a DVD ISO and perform a DVD based upgrade.

So, I discovered there is another way to perform the preupgrade. What I did was to let the preugrade start. At the point it starts to download the boot images in /boot/ugrades (second step), I created a link for /boot/upgrades/install.img to point to /install.img (e.g. ln -s /install.img /boot/upgrades/install.img). Because on wireless it takes a few minutes to download the boot kernel, there is enough time to create the link.

The preupgrade continues as normal and then reboots when it is ready to do the upgrade.

Upon reboot, it complains that it does not have a network connection and cannot find ks.cfg. But, when I skip that screen, it asks for the location of “install.img”. It comes up with a menu to select a disk partition and the a method to type the full path to “install.img”. Once selected, the upgrade begins and completes through the normal process.

When I rebooted the system, it came up at Fedora 12 with no issues.

One thing to note, the preupgrade process does not remove /boot/upgrades, /install.img or /var/cache/yum/preupgrade*. So, you must remove these files manually. But, you have a complete Fedora 12 upgrade without having to do a great deal of work on your syste ahead of time.